


Grave Breach

by Goethicite



Category: Captain America, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Dark, Gen, Genocide, Graphic Description, Historical, Nightmare Material, War Crimes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-09-25
Updated: 2012-09-25
Packaged: 2017-11-15 01:46:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/521813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goethicite/pseuds/Goethicite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Avengers were never meant to be superheroes.  Let's be frank, the word monster applies a whole lot more to a pair of battered soldiers than a quiet scientist who's the poster boy for why you never, ever skimp on adherence to lab safety.  A 'grave breach' of the Geneva Conventions and associated protocols is the term used for the worst kinds of violations.  These are also known as 'War Crimes' and 'Crimes against Humanity'.  These are grave breaches associated with Avengers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. AP 1 Article 85, Paragraph 3 (a) & (d), GC 4 Art. 147

Clint Barton speaks nine languages other than English. Six of them are fluent. His Spanish is god-awful. His Portuguese isn't any better. Though Pashto, Farsi, Dari, Kurdish, and Arabic roll off his tongue, his flat, American accent butchers each hummed R and soft vowel. He speaks Spanish fluently, but no one would ever call it that with how awkward the words sound in his mouth. He thinks that's because the only thing he ever used it for was asking questions of men left hung from trees in the steamy air of the jungle, screaming.

There is a file somewhere listing his confirmed kills. He stopped counting in Afghanistan and never started again. The only number in his head is sickly green-black. The number is fifty-six, and he knows each of their faces. That's the number of civilians he's killed. Three accidentally, fifty-two on orders. He knows it doesn't add up.

Two was a man Clint's age trying to run away. Three was his daughter who Clint didn't see until he'd already put a bullet through the runner. One is a faded memory with black eyes beneath a burqa a shade darker who stepped into his line of fire.

Four through Twenty-four are orders. He remembers the claymores going off and the voice in his ear, steady and firm, "Take the survivors." Four through Nineteen die from either the explosion or the shrapnel. Most of them are streaks of blood and raw meat in his memory because they didn't have faces left. He pulled the trigger five times before his mind caught up with his body, and he realized that the 'rebel forces' that walked into his ambush are just peasants bleeding out on broken, stone floors of the Buddhist temple.

Twenty-five was murder. A man who was late to worship screamed at Clint as he walked into the clearing to see the damage he'd wrought. Clint shot from the hip not out of necessity but shame that someone knew what he'd done to people who were nothing but farmers in their place of worship. He'd regretted it even as he'd squeezed the trigger, but the man was dead. Clint was too good not kill him at that range. Clint mutilated the body to match the others. So no one's every realized he's something worse than a killer.

Twenty-six through fifty-six include faces he'll never forget because he trained them. The deaths are on Loki's head, but the blood is ground into every crease of Clint's hands.

If there is a god, which Clint doubts, then he hopes that there's just enough mercy when the world finally balances accounts (and he catches a bullet, or a blade, or something more exotic) that someone will know him well enough to dump his body by the side of the road for the carrion birds in the place where he died for the first time, when the number was still three and people still believed he was a good man.


	2. GC 3 Art. 130

There is a dream Steve has that isn't a nightmare. He'd feel better if it was. But it's not a dream, or a nightmare, it's a memory. In his dream, there are six men in green, wool uniforms. They kneel in the icy mud on the ground in front of a trench. Their black boots, polish long gone, are smudge, scratched, and soaked. In the trench lay the bodies of men, women, and children of all ages, stripped naked and tangled together like broken dolls. Cold blood, almost black, is smeared everywhere like ink on an artist's fingers over their white flesh. A baby cries from the trench. So weak. Gabe jumps down and wades through the bodies after it. He vomits on a woman's face. Her dead mouth gapes, and the half-digested sawdust bread and coffee trickles from the corners of her lips in a gruesome parody of life.

They are not all Jewish. In fact, if there are any Jews no one would know about it. They are Poles who hold little love for Semites. However, their small village was chosen to be made an example of because of rebel activity in the area. The baby cries, but Gabe can't find it. Jamie and Jacques join the search as well. Eventually, the cries taper off and stop. There is a gun in Steve's hand, .45 caliber with a full clip. Next to him, Bucky racks a round into the chamber of his rifle. Steve mostly remembers how much the cries sound like Bucky's little sister right before the coughing finally killed her. He doesn't give any orders, and no one stops him when he shoots the first man. Bucky takes the second. The barrel of his rifle is less than a hand-breadth from the back of the man's head. The bullet tears apart the German's skull as he tumbles into the trench with his victims. One of the soldiers tries to get up. Dum-Dum guts him and pushes him down into the corpses holding the shiny, steaming coils of his own entrails. Jacques screams in French and hits the man in the face. The Frenchmen wasn't completely clear of the trench and was knocked back down. The other three prisoners stay down for their bullet, staring wide-eyed at their screaming comrade being beaten to a pulp. Steve shoots one more. Bucky takes the other two. Jamie and Gabe pull Jacques out of the trench. There is gore on his face and fists.

Jacques finishes swearing at everyone. They regroup to go back to the burned out husks where the inn once stood. Most likely their contact is jumbled with the other bodies in the trench. The German officer's body is on fire in the middle of the ruined town square. Peggy stands nearby with a can of petrol at her feet and a cigarette between her lips. His blood covered uniform is laying to one side. The blood is centered on the groin. So Steve looks away. Peggy's face is distant as she smokes. Her red lipstick leaves a nauseating ring on the white paper when she pulls the cigarette away to speak. "The girl's dead too. Bayonet to the belly." The fact there is no screaming means that Peggy had finished the job the Germans had started.

"We took care of the rest of the Krauts," Steve tells her with unwieldy, oddly thick lips and tongue. The smile she gives him makes his stomach ache with warmth and the need to kiss her. Then he wakes up and runs to the bathroom to vomit, because the war is over. And Captain America killed two men in cold blood then kissed his girl on the cheek with a smile.


	3. AP 1 Article 85 Paragraph 3 (a-c), Paragraph 4 (b)

The first drink Tony every took was two weeks after he turned seven. In history, his class had just reached the end of the unit on World War II. Seven-year old Tony drank to forget the shadow of the little boy on the wall in his history book. The only way to know it was a boy was from the shoe which had been protected by a concrete ledge near the center of Hiroshima. His father always drank when people talked about the Bombs. So little Tony figured that he could forgot his father helped kill a little boy just like his own son if he drank from the same bottle.

His nanny caught him, of course, and dragged him in front of his parents reeling and sick to his stomach. His mother had frowned. His father had glared. It was the only time Tony ever asked his father about the Bombs. It was the only time his father had ever hit him. Howard had been a little more than drunk when he left the red mark on Tony's cheek. Maria had smashed her high heel into his her husband's foot hard enough he'd limped away in defense. Tony never said anything about it again.

Tony makes a point not to go to Hiroshima or Nagasaki whenever he has business in Japan. He's a Stark, and there is something deeply wrong in his mind with a Stark walking the streets built on the ashes of the families and homes obliterated by technology that made his family rich. He's seen the pictures and read all the books. Every year he donates money towards the research of long term treatments for radiation poisoning, but he know that his name means he can never buy absolution.

Stark Industries is an empire built in blood, much of it innocent. Tony drank to forget and made more weapons that ended more innocent lives, but he's sobered up now and seeing clearly what he and his family have built. He's seen the tapes with Loki telling Natasha that her ledger will never be clean. It makes him laugh, because Natasha, beautiful, lethal Natasha, is a single woman. No matter what shame she carries about her father and her past, Tony knows that she's pure as driven snow next to him. His father helped murder 100,000 civilians at least in the name of the good ol' US of A. Tony's number never topped 5,000, but blood weighs a fuckton more than the ink used to print the statistics.


End file.
